


every hope of you is dead

by Lire_Casander



Series: tryna find any truth in between the lies (the Roswell New Mexico Week 2019) [6]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Depictions Of War Violence, Dissociation, Hallucinations, M/M, rnmweek19, roswellweek19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-21 05:15:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19996462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lire_Casander/pseuds/Lire_Casander
Summary: i find it hard to find my feet when i keep on stumbling over you and me, but i keep on trying 'cause i know i need to outrun the memories





	every hope of you is dead

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary from _Tough_ by Lewis Capaldi. It belongs to the _**tryna find any truth in between the lies (the Roswell New Mexico Week 2019)**_ series, whose title also belongs to a song by Lewis Capaldi, _Something Borrowed_. 
> 
> This is written for the [Roswell New Mexico Week](https://roswellnewmexicoweek.tumblr.com/post/184757488673/welcome-to-roswell-new-mexico-week-2019-each-day) over at tumblr, **_Day 7: Make something RNM related you’ve always wanted to make. BE BOLD, BE WEIRD._**
> 
> Anything you recognize is not mine, although any and every mistake is my own. Beta-read by the amazing [estel_willow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/estel_willow).

The pain is both searing and numbing. He’s left grasping for the seams in this new reality where he’s lying in the dirt in some faraway desert, half-hidden by sand and terror. He tries to crawl but there’s some metallic structure trapping him, pinning him to the ground which is somehow covered in blood – blood that keeps pouring down from a wound he can’t pinpoint right away. He doesn’t feel anything from his neck down, anything but the excruciating pain coursing through his veins and tethering him to the rocks and the dunes he’s been trying to escape for what feels like forever.

“Manes,” he hears, distantly, an urgency in the voice calling to him. He tries to look around, to focus on the sounds, but as he cranes his neck to the right he feels needles puncturing through him. He lets his head fall back down onto the ground. “Manes, you have to focus on me!” The voice keeps urging, and now a pair of hands are shaking him, spreading the fire he has inside, making him burn from underneath his bones, breaking in prickles throughout his skin. 

He doesn’t find his voice. 

“Stay with me, Manes!”

He closes his eyes, the voice beginning to fade as the darkness claims him. The pain lifts him in a haze of wraith and forgetfulness, images blooming behind his eyelids as he feels more and more detached from his own body – as he floats around in a sea of clouds and rain, until he realizes the raindrops are his own tears, and he wonders for a brief moment what he’s crying over. 

He comes to a halt against the wooden door of the toolshed he’s known so well for so long. There is laughter escaping through the hinges holding together the construction, bubbling and _happy_. He needs to steal a peek, the want lacing with the rankling of memories he can’t escape. He knows what he’ll find if he dares to look through the holes in the old, cracked wood walls, and still he reaches out, ignoring the ache nailing from his shoulder to his fingertips. The moment his hand contacts the wall, he stumbles through the wood as though it’s made of thin air and soupy smoke all condensed in one swift swarm of rivulet-like reality. One moment he’s on the outside attempting to look in, and the next he’s face to face with his younger self staring up at a seventeen-year-old Michael Guerin.

He has to blink back the tears that spring to his eyes as the memory – the hallucination he doesn’t want to leave – unfolds before his gaze, Michael’s fingers carefully caressing his shoulder blade, right after the only bliss they’ve ever known, right before hell was brought upon their heads. Before his life started dancing to the rhythm of a hammer slamming down on hopes and dreams and future. He tilts his head as the image develops in slow motion, his own smile mirrored in a relaxed grin from Michael, until everything stops and he can walk around the memory, his own pain soothing as he detaches from reality and touches this figment of his own mind.

He’s not allowing anything bad to happen to them in this hallucination. He’s going to protect his younger self, and Michael’s, from the wrath and the decay and the mourning of years lost in alcohol and despair and dreams that never came true. At least in his own mind he can replay this scene however he wants, as many times as his soul needs, until he wears out the seams of the memory that’s been with him for so long that’s now ingrained in his own DNA alongside the genes that give him his mother’s eyes and his father’s build. This memory of the first and last time he’s felt whole, happy and safe in his whole life is engraved in his brain cells, and he’s known for clinging onto it in times of need.

Reality is yanking him back to another desert, to the bite of the sand and the unbreathable heat of death and despair. The pain he felt everywhere is now focused below his waist, while his torso and his head feel like they’re exploding with a tension he’s never experienced before. There’s that voice again, accompanied by a sob that wasn’t there before, and he has to make a big effort not to slip under again, back to his dream.

“Manes, stay with me, you hear me? I’m getting you out of here!”

He still can’t feel anything that’s not the blazing pain, the fire that engulfs him and threatens to burn him to ashes if he so much as _breathes_. Someone – probably the body attached to the voice that’s attempting unsuccessfully to keep him awake – keeps stomping on the weight holding him hostage. He wants to help, wants to kick out the metal crushing him, but he can’t move his legs. He doesn’t even _feel_ his right foot. The weight gives way under the picking of hands and the sheer force of nature that lifts him when there’s nothing trapping him.

The moment the metallic structure is lifted, agony like nothing he’s ever known hauls him, ripping apart his insides and turning his brain to cinders. The pain is everywhere – fused in his cells, melted against the core of his very self – until he can’t be aware of the limits of his own body and the beginning of an ache that has finally claimed him as its own, branding him with molten heat, burning a sweltering path of flames in its wake. 

It takes him a moment to realize that the wails surrounding him are his own, and then there’s darkness again.

Next thing he knows, he’s riding shotgun in an old Chevy built in the early sixties. There’s music playing from the beaten up radio, and his own hand on top of the driver’s, steering the wheel with the same energetic stubbornness that’s so characteristic in him. This time, when he peels his eyes from the New Mexico desert – and he recognizes it because of the haunting colors under the dusting light – he’s faced with the very same seventeen-year-old Michael Guerin from before. He remembers this moment, he knows he’s retreated somewhere safe, back into his memories once again.

For the first time, he wonders if all these trips down to memory lane are happening to him because he’s about to die in another desert, under a different sky, while the same sun settles on the horizon that’s always kept him away from his own dreams.

Michael stares briefly at him with a love so pure in his hazel eyes that it hurts to just look _back_. He does his best to match the slow smile on Michael’s lips, because in this memory, this time around, he isn’t a voyeur hovering above the scenery. This time he’s an active part, and fuck him if he’s going to mess with one of the few happy memories he has from before his own downfall.

The country song playing in the radio morphs into a sweet ballad, and Michael’s features go soft as he focuses back on the road. His left hand is mangled against the leather of the wheel, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Michael squeezes the hand on top of his before pulling off the road in the middle of the desert. There’s a pause before they both saunter out of the vehicle and crash into one another, swaying awkwardly to the music as they kiss, sloppily, needily. He _remembers_ that last day before his enlistment, before leaving Roswell. He remembers convincing himself that it’s for the best, but also talking himself into brandishing his own feelings and showing his heart on his sleeve for once, so Michael wouldn’t even _dare_ doubt about how he felt. He remembers pretending that everything would be fine, that he’d be able to come back unscathed. He almost believed it himself. 

He’s not sure he’s ever going to be able to forget the last time he kissed Michael without fear, even after everything.

This memory clatters with the sounds of propellers above his head, the music blending with the noises of engines and shouts for them to get cover. He fights for his grasp on the alternate reality where they’re both frozen in place, cheerful and young and surrounded by such mirth that it’s difficult to breathe properly while staring at them from afar. He stumbles upon his own memory, and the images slide through his fingers with the sand that’s being shaken off his uniform as he’s lifted from the ground and placed onto a stretcher. He wants to cry, he wants to fight. He doesn’t want to leave this souvenir unattended, alone in the darkest corners of his mind – he’s afraid of how the ghosts in his soul can torture this happy moment into an awful mask of powerlessness and heart wrench agony. 

His mind wanders between the pain that sheers upon him, bringing back the violence tattooed with fire into his soul, and the calm brought by the melodies playing on repeat in his mind – the balance between the present tense of his scarcely strung together consciousness and the past tense of a soul touched by love and blissful innocence.

In this present, his fingers hold tight onto an old, faded picture of two teenagers looking together into a bright future of music and love. In his past, he grabs hold of the dearest memory of a kiss carved in his soul as he struggles not to give up control of his consciousness. He wants to fight. He wants to stay awake.

But, just like everything else that’s ever mattered to him, like all of those fights that he’s ever needed to win – he can’t. He loses.

He’s not strong enough.


End file.
